And his sensual resurrection was incredible—­an aberrated Dog Star flaming in a physical November, at a spiritual All Hallows.  Tranquil, dried up, safe from crises, without veritable desires, almost impotent, or rather completely forgetful of sex for months at a time, he was suddenly roused—­and for an unreality!—­by the mystery of mad letters.

“Enough!” he cried, smiting the table a jarring blow.

He clapped on his hat and went out, slamming the door behind him.

“I know how to make my imagination behave!” and he rushed over to the Latin Quarter to see a prostitute he knew.  “I have been a good boy too long,” he murmured as he hurried down the street.  “One can’t stay on the straight and narrow path for ever.”

He found the woman at home and had a miserable time.  She was a buxom brunette with festive eyes and the teeth of a wolf.  An expert, she could, in a few seconds, drain one’s marrow, granulate the lungs, and demolish the loins.

She chid him for having been away so long, then cajoled him and kissed him.  He felt pathetic, listless, out of breath, out of place, for he had no genuine desires.  He finally flung himself on a couch and, enervated to the point of crying, he went through the back-breaking motions mechanically, like a dredge.

Never had he so execrated the flesh, never had he felt such repugnance and lassitude, as when he issued from that room.  He strolled haphazard down the rue Soufflot, and the image of the unknown obsessed him, more irritating, more tenacious.

“I begin to understand the superstition of the succubus.  I must try some bromo-exorcism.  Tonight I will swallow a gram of bromide of potassium.  That will make my senses be good.”

But he realized that the trouble was not primarily physical, that really it was only the consequence of an extraordinary state of mind.  His love for that which departed from the formula, for that projection out of the world which had recently cheered him in art, had deviated and sought expression in a woman.  She embodied his need to soar upward from the terrestrial humdrum.

“It is those precious unworldly studies, those cloister thoughts picturing ecclesiastical and demoniac scenes, which have prepared me for the present folly,” he said to himself.  His unsuspected, and hitherto unexpressed, mysticism, which had determined his choice of subject for his last work was now sending him out, in disorder, to seek new pains and pleasures.

As he walked along he recapitulated what he knew of the woman.  She was married, blonde, in easy circumstances because she had her own sleeping quarters and a maid.  She lived in the neighbourhood, because she went to the rue Littre post-office for her mail.  Her name, supposing she had prefixed her own initial to the name of Maubel, was Henriette, Hortense, Honorine, Hubertine, or Helene.  What else?  She must frequent the society of artists, because she had met him, and for years he had not been in a bourgeois drawing-room.  She was some kind of a morbid Catholic, because that word succubus was unknown to the profane.  That was all.  Then there was her husband, who, gullible as he might be, must nevertheless suspect their liaison, since, by her own confession, she dissembled her obsession very badly.